Project# 6: In Protest of Corporate Personhood
12/01/09
Artist’s Statement
I do not promote any modernist concept of hierarchy within art; there is no one special way to make art, nor is there one single sort of “authentic” motivation behind art-making, so long as it is an expression of human thought or emotion. Indeed, I believe any assertion that one reason for making art is less valid than any other to be preposterous, based in a sort of power-struggle, and therefore ripe for dissection. Art began as a means for the human race to express what it did not understand about the world, but with which it was in communion—the animal kingdom, primarily, on which Paleolithic man fed, and with which early modes of human thought joined in a sort of commonality of the hunt. It has been so much more since then, and it continues to become. Art, as human expression, an expression of life, is above any one mode of thought.
In my paintings I tend to aim specifically for a personal sense of aesthetic beauty, because to me the act of painting is a spiritual exercise, a way for me to interact with the world on a level that rises above the political aspects of man and the small-mindedness of artistic autocracy.
Digital art, though, seems particularly suited to expressing a discrete message, particularly because of the ease by which hegemonistic messages may be subverted using their own means of communication, sets of images and assumptions. And there is plenty of hegemony in our society for the artist to rail against, as our fellow human beings become sucked into a system which requires certain behaviors and beliefs that are, in fact, at odds with their own personal well-being, whether they are subservient to the hegemonistic interests or are in fact personally involved in their manufacture.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in the wake of America’s Civil War, in order to extend the protections of the Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments, passed immediately after the Constitution’s ratification) to “persons” as against the States, not only as against the Federal Government (which was the only institution whose actions had been restricted in the first place). It was an effort on the part of a newly strengthened Federal government to guarantee rights to emancipated slaves, because the governments of States in the south could not be relied upon to grant any protections to people they had only recently regarded as property rather than citizens (as the Jim Crow laws passed afterward seem evidence enough to support).
But within twenty years of the 14th Amendment’s ratification, the law was seized upon to grant corporations—which are themselves literal creations of individual States—access to those same protections, and at a much higher rate than it was ever used by former slaves, who remained largely disenfranchised (a fact which itself highlights the function of money disparity within our legal system). The nation’s Courts were complicit: by interpreting the term “persons” to include corporations, they opened up what amounts to a new brand of social hierarchy, in which a corporation—so long as there are people to man its helm—may be an immortal entity with a political voice and rights against both State and Federal government, allowing the corporation to amass great amounts of wealth and maintain it over time, wielding a feudal lord’s power over human beings—ACTUAL persons—by redoubling the political voice of its current power-holders through the granting of outsized contributions to politicians, a First Amendment right (because the Courts have interpreted the giving of money to be political speech). The corporation, a fiction, has become a Titan on the world-political stage, pursuing its singular, sociopathic motive: profit. Human considerations are tossed aside, where the law permits; sweatshops in third-world countries are evidence of this. Human beings, perceiving this imbalance of power, subconsciously attempt to join with it and to replicate it for ourselves, and all sense of empathy in society becomes viewed as weakness; charity becomes viewed as adjunct only to religion (which corporate owners know full well is faltering in income), rather than as a vital thread in the social fabric (except, as we have seen recently, when the corporations themselves need a hand-out).
My current project is a series of posters which aim to reveal the fact of corporate personhood to people who may not even consciously know it exists—as I did not before attending law school—and to get them questioning what exactly it is and how our society got this way. As such, these posters do not point back to their creator. I prefer them to be anonymous, since their intended purpose has nothing to do with bringing attention to me. Their showing-place is meant to be the streets of cities or suburban areas, as a sort of leaflet to be digested by as many eyes as possible outside of a gallery setting and in the corporation’s own proving-ground, to begin a sort of dialogue using this juxtaposition to grant it context and power. These posters are 8.5 x 11 inches (letter size) because I want to be able to print them off as cheaply as possible, to more easily increase their number and to replace them as those who feel threatened by them tear them down—which, in a world where human being relates to corporation as baby relates to parent, is inevitable.
Project #3: Metaphors and Space
Mother Earth, indeed.
Assignment #6: Metaphor and Cliche
Assignment #6
Questions:
What makes an image cliché?
An image-metaphor that was once fresh and interesting can be made cliché by its overuse in representing some concept, to the point that people use it reflexively, without actually considering what the comparison means. “I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
What is a metaphor?
A metaphor, in language, is the use of one ‘image’ to represent another state of being or thing. The same goes in visual language.
How does it function?
It stands in for the thing it represents. “My soul is a slithering, gold-plated dragon.”
Why is it important?
It introduces play to our usually linear thinking, and allows for conceiving of ideas or concepts in ways that allow for comparison outside of literal meaning. It is most often a poetic device, but is used as well in strong prose writing and in the creation of images.
Smarmy Metaphor
Waaaaay Cliche ... and still used, so seriously.
Project #2: 14 Days, 14 Images
C-check it out!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42629238@N06/sets/72157622447038996/show/
It’s a set of sequential images created using Photoshop and Corel Painter, posted on Flickr.
Assignment #5: Themes in Digital Art
There are numerous forms of digital media, which digital artists explore for the possibilities they create, as well as for the ramifications that each has on human beings. The major themes as asserted in our reading are: artificial life and intelligence; telepresence and telerobotics; database aesthetics, mapping, and data visualization; activism and tactical media; gaming and narrative hypermedia environments; mobile and locative media; social networks; and virtual worlds.
These “themes” in digital art are the media through which artists may explore the interaction of these media with humankind (and vice versa). As such there is a strong internal feedback loop to many of the artistic projects conceived with the media.
The projection of the self into realms where one’s physical body does not exist is a major theme which runs throughout these media. Artists play with this as an extension of the self, but also as an alienating phenomenon—whether we like it or not, the human body is the couch of the self, and to deny our materiality is to deny what we actually are (favoring the mind to the body almost completely, thereby creating something of a Cartesian nightmare).
The most prevalent theme seems to be the concept of surveillance. The strongest players in the digital realm will always be the most well-monied (and therefore capable of creating and sometimes imposing the hierarchy within digital media, almost always in their favor), but artists represent the human reaction to this hierarchy, using the fact of the digital realm’s ultimate lack of intrinsic hierarchical structure both to point out the alterations in human thinking caused by linking with machines and to reveal the human struggle with corporations (currently deathless super-citizens) and other entities (such as governmental ones) who attempt to shape our perception of reality in their favor—often using media and their presumed authority to assert “truth” quite successfully (the “images” of weapons of mass destruction which were used as our basis for invading Iraq have been argued by some to be doctored images—and were, either way, undeniably false, and used maliciously against the citizens of both the US and the world).
For millennia, Western culture has favored the rights of the individual. Yet we are now subject to assaults on this value-system through invasions of privacy by both corporate and governmental entities, who may now view us through surveillance akin to that postulated by George Orwell in his “1984.” The interconnectedness provided by our internet and the various media which interact through it can be used as tools by those who would either attempt to view our behaviors, to catalog our behaviors, or to control them. This marks a full-frontal assault on the privacy and autonomy of the individual. Yet we cannot easily discard our biological desire for connections, and—in a world where the lives of many people consist of waking in the morning, going immediately to work (often to spend the better parts of their days in front of a computer under constant surveillance), then returning home just in time to sleep in order to be fresh for work in the morning—personal connections have become harder to make. Some elements of the digital realm offer a sort of solace. But this is a position of social weakness, and is easily exploited.
It is the duty of digital artists to explore the positive and negative aspects of these media in order to perhaps carve out a positive future for the use of digital media, and for the fate of humankind.
